My interview during the excellent HiPEAC ACACES summer school this year. Why should computer scientists and engineers study sustainability? What are the most important topics to investigate in this field? How can we reconcile the push for ever more computing with the fact that there are finite planetary resources? And what can we do as individuals and collectively to push for a sustainable future?
Best paper award for Wasted Energy?
Absolutely delighted to find that our Pervasive Computing paper: Christian Remy, Adam Tyler, Paul Smith, Oliver Bates, Adrian Friday, “Wasted Energy? Illuminating Energy Data With Ontologies,” in IEEE Pervasive Computing, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 27-37, April-June 2024, just won a ‘best paper’ award. The paper deals with all the non-energy data (context) you need to make sense of and explore time-series energy data, and proposes an approach for organisations to improve the gathering of this, in part using ontologies.
Enjoyed my invited talk at MobiUK on ‘rethinking resource efficiency’ for sustainabilty
Enjoyed the chance to talk to the interesting folks at MobiUK on mobile computing and sustainability. I attempted to reconsider the role of ‘resource efficiency’ not as a driver of growth of ICT’s impacts on the planet, but rather to work within planetary limits. Digital technology unquestionably transforms our understanding of the world and helps society reconfigure itself to do new things from better healthcare, climate science, self-driving cars and smart cities, and more. Yet, I argued, ICT has significant direct impacts on energy material systems, and an exponentially growing footprint. As researchers, innovators and practitioners, what should the MobiUK community be doing to help bring about a more environmentally sustainable future? The slides are available.
Talk with ecologists without borders in Slovenia, well, online :)
Enjoyed doing talk to inspiring group (Ekologi brez meja – ecologists without borders) in Slovenia on Building digital solutions for the Anthropocene: avoiding digital wastefulness (talk on YouTube). Key points: how the infrastructure we build into the tools we use everyday, e.g. building AI into search, is leading to growth in energy demand, data centres and materials. Plus the need to look systematically at energy systems, IT, water and material resources and how they do and will impact the environment and society in the future.
No planet B, interactions blog post on sustainability, HCI and academic practice
Writeup reflecting on the themes from our panel at CHI 2023 on sustainability in HCI (at last!). The panel were myself, Ann Light, Jason Tarl Jacques, Matthew Louis Mauriello, Kathrin Gerling, Robert Soden, Gözel Shakeri, and we were enabled by the SIGCHI sustainability committee and chair Nicola J. Bidwell, Vishal Sharma, and Neha Kumar. We talk about the need to exercise all our agency (in our research and our academic practice), to recognise the embedding of drivers of unsustainability, and the need to embed and encourage sustainability focused work.
Talk: Metabolising the Planet, UCLIC talk @ UCL, 9th October
Thoroughly enjoyed talking with the excellent folks at UCLIC at UCL on 9th October on the growing and multidimensional impacts of adopting ‘environmentally and energy expensive’ ICT in research and beyond. They asked great questions 🙂 The slides are online and you can find the actual talk on YouTube.
Talk: Where’s the value in energy data science?
Thoroughly enjoyed talking about the missing context to energy data time-series with the good folks at Keele in software & systems and Digital Society. Check out the slides.
Enjoying the Pentland Centre for Sustainability ‘transforming tomorrow’ podcast series
Really interesting series of podcasts exploring sustainability in business and sustainable infrastructures. There’s even an episode this week by your truly on ICT and its impacts.
Infinite growth without environmental impact?
Delighted to see our short article in the IES’ Environmental Scientist magazine making the case for ‘climate proportional computing’ is now available as open access!
re:publica 2023 Berlin
As part of the net0insights project, Christian presented Lancaster University’s efforts to contribute to a more sustainable future at the re:publica conference in Berlin. re:publica is a “festival for the digital society” where representatives of politics, industry, research, and media meet to discuss how digitalisation can shape our world, and do so in a sustainable way. The conference offers plenty of opportunity for networking as it is less focused on stages with speakers, but has a lot of booths were organisations present their work and are available to chat. The diversity of exhibitions, ranging from Germany’s biggest media stations, several municipalities, research labs, and small organisations, but also most governmental departments, offered plenty of thought-provoking conversations and new contacts. While most attendees roam those smaller booths and exhibitions, the big presentation areas are particularly crowded when government representatives take the stage, such as the Vice Chancellor and Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action. Overall the event was an interesting alternative to traditional academic conferences and highly recommended!